A reader stopped reading me and I don’t know why.

So what, you shrug, readers come and go, you’ve got others, your audience is growing. Granted, but that’s not how any urgent maker thinks. A reader is not a statistic, but a relationship, evidence of intimacy, and yes, friends weave in and out of our lives, but when one vanishes, curiosity does not readily relent. Was it something I said? Have their lives changed, thus their habits? Maybe it’s the pestiferous machine that’s keeping us apart – this happens, alas – some glitch and a longtime interlocutor assumes I’ve quit my post (and posting). Not long ago, I was relieved – albeit saddened – to learn that a valued reader had died. Sappy storytellers notwithstanding, death’s a fact, not a verdict.

Love is so complex! Why this person and not another? Why these fantasies of affiliation? Why do we “go off” someone who “meant the world” to us? Self-interest, self-perception, need, what we call “chemistry” all play their part. We eye friends’ silences as augurs the clouds for a clue. We scrutinize the mirror. We’re not as young as we used to be – to put it mildly! – could that be it?

I’m a love-glutton, as you may have noticed. Most makers are, I suspect. We perform for your approval. Maybe our parents short-changed us in the love department – who knows? – we are needy now. I live in others’ eyes – we all do, I submit; no eyes, no life. The way to discipline a puppy, Jane and I have been taught, is to ignore their objectionable behavior: to look away from them is punishment worse than whacking. I know the feeling.

Lost readers crash my dreams. These infidels (if that’s what they are) aren’t welcome in my inner precincts but here they are, lurking, glowering, sneering. I can read their minds, it seems, and what I read appalls. I’m impelled to apologize – but for what? If only I knew what divided us!

We mistake art as a thing, well or ill made, satisfactory or not. Art is a plea – a drowning soul reaching for a hand. It measures our incompletion, our need for others. The greatest art somehow quivers with this importunacy. Study Michelangelo’s Pieta, for example, or a Beethoven late quartet: can’t you feel their maker plucking at your sleeve, tugging you, across the centuries? Please, please, they pant, don’t let me die.

Love is weakness – a divine weakness, to my mind, the most lavish of gifts. It provides us a persuasive reason to exist – what more precious bounty? It wakens us to the vulnerability of humanity and our own limitations. It enlarges our awareness and inspires us to create. It hurts – sometimes like hell – but that pain rescues us – from the sterility of selfishness. Why live, if not for those we love?

Whom we love is immaterial. God, kid, dog, partner, reader are versions of the same vision – of an animate being who values us, who’s glad we’re alive, for whose sake we’d be willing to sacrifice much, even all. We cannot know what another thinks of us, but we can imagine, and this fantasy solaces.

Makers sometimes depict themselves as heroes, knight-errants in pursuit of the beautiful and true. Don’t believe it. We are mendicants begging for a friendly glance. Our insufficiency is our engine, not our shame.

A latecomer to love, I had no idea what I was missing until I’d almost missed out. Like many a late-in-life convert, I celebrate my discovery with astonished zeal. Love, for my money, is the only good reason to be. Nothing matters more.